As Paramount, with close ties to the Trump administration, entered the bidding, experts predict any merger will ‘raise red flags’ among regulators
Over the first 10 months of his second presidency, Donald Trump has not hidden his desire to control the US media industry – from encouraging TV networks to fire journalists, comedians and critics he dislikes to pushing regulators to revoke broadcast licences. Now he seems determined to set the terms for one of the biggest media deals in history.
It’s a deal that could have repercussions not just in the US, but across the world, with not just the future of Hollywood at stake but also the landscape of news.
The former X Factor judge is back, auditioning boyband wannabes for his latest talent show – but gen Z doesn’t seem to care very much, or even know who he is
Have we gone back in time to 2010? If only! No, Simon Cowell is just back in the headlines, reasserting his svengali status for his new Netflix show. Reviews suggest that Cowell’s attempted comeback, 15 years since his celebrity peak, highlights less his particular star power than how totally the world has moved on. But is there anything to learn from SyCo now, and will his new boyband work? Let’s see!
Rian Johnson has another Benoit Blanc hit on his hands with Wake Up Dead Man, in which Blanc tackles the strange death of a fire-and-brimstone parish priest, Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). It’s a classic locked-room mystery in a spookily Gothic small-town setting, and Johnson turned to cinematographer Steve Yedlin (Looper, The Last Jedi) to help realize his artistic vision.
(Minor spoilers below but no major reveals.)
Yedlin worked on the previous two Knives Out installments. He’s known Johnson since the two were in their teens, and that longstanding friendship ensures that they are on the same page, aesthetically, from the start when they work on projects.
The president’s son-in-law is once again at the center of an international business deal that will require administration approval
On Monday, Paramount Skydance launched a $108bn takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, the entertainment giant that owns Hollywood movie studios, along with CNN, HBO and other media businesses. The bid is led by David Ellison, son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison – a prominent Donald Trump supporter and Republican donor. Netflix had already prevailed over Paramount in a previous bidding competition for the purchase, but Trump announced on Sunday that he would “be involved” in his administration’s review of the Netflix deal. The president suggested the sale “could be a problem” because Netflix is already dominant in the US streaming market.
Lawsuit argues that proposed deal threatens to reduce competition in US subscription video-on-demand market
Netflix has been hit with a consumer lawsuit seeking to block the online video giant’s planned $72bn acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery’s studio and streaming businesses.
The proposed class action was filed on Monday by a subscriber to Warner Bros-owned HBO Max who said the proposed deal threatened to reduce competition in the US subscription video-on-demand market.
The battle to buy Warner Bros Discovery has captured Donald Trump’s attention. The US President has declared he’ll be involved in the decision on the company’s sale, as both Netflix and Paramount fight to take over the entertainment giant. Lucy Hough speaks to Guardian US deputy business editor Callum Jones
The bidding war is over, and Netflix has been declared the winner.
After flirting with Paramount Skydance and Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has decided to sell its streaming and movie studios business to Netflix. If approved, the deal is set to overturn the media landscape and create ripples that will affect Hollywood for years.
$72 billion acquisition
Netflix will pay an equity value of $72 billion, or an approximate total enterprise value of $82.7 billion, for Warner Bros. All of WBD has a $60 billion market value, NBC News notes.
Have you been trying to cast Stranger Things from your phone, only to find that your TV isn’t cooperating? It’s not the TV—Netflix is to blame for this one, and it’s intentional. The streaming app has recently updated its support for Google Cast to disable the feature in most situations. You’ll need to pay for one of the company’s more expensive plans, and even then, Netflix will only cast to older TVs and streaming dongles.
The Google Cast system began appearing in apps shortly after the original Chromecast launched in 2013. Since then, Netflix users have been able to start video streams on TVs and streaming boxes from the mobile app. That was vital for streaming targets without their own remote or on-screen interface, but times change.
Today, Google has moved beyond the remote-free Chromecast experience, and most TVs have their own standalone Netflix apps. Netflix itself is also allergic to anything that would allow people to share passwords or watch in a new place. Over the last couple of weeks, Netflix updated its app to remove most casting options, mirroring a change in 2019 to kill Apple AirPlay.
Nothing says it’s holiday season quite like a new installment of Rian Johnson’s delightful Knives Out mystery series. The final trailer for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery was just released, featuring Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in all his Southern gentleman detective glory. This time, he’s tackling the strange death of a parish priest in a spookily Gothic small-town setting.
As we’ve previously reported, the original Knives Out was a masterfully plotted winning mashup of Clue and Murder on the Orient Express—or any number of adaptations of novels by the grande dame of murder mysteries, Agatha Christie—along with other classics like Deathtrap, Gosford Park, and Murder by Death. Craig clearly found Blanc a refreshing counter to the 007 franchise, and he and Johnson soon committed to filming a sequel: 2022’s Glass Onion, inspired particularly by the Christie-based “tropical getaway” whodunnit Evil Under the Sun (1982) and an under-appreciated 1973 gem called The Last of Sheila.
And now we have Wake Up Dead Man. With this franchise, the less one knows going in, the better. But Johnson has assembled yet another winning all-star cast. Josh Brolin plays the victim, the fire-and-brimstone-spewing Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks; Josh O’Connor plays a young priest named Rev. Jud Duplenticy; Glenn Close plays a devout churchgoer named Martha Delacroix, Wick’s loyal helper; Mila Kunis plays local police chief Geraldine Scott; Jeremy Renner plays town doctor Nat Sharp; Kerry Washington plays uptight lawyer Vera Draven; Daryl McCormack plays aspiring politician Cy Draven; Thomas Haden Church plays groundskeeper Samson Holt; Andrew Scott plays bestselling author Lee Ross; and Cailee Spaeny plays Simone Vivane, a disabled former classical cellist.
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In what seems a phishing attack targeted at a certain audience, scammers are impersonating Netflix and reaching out to marketing staff.
The initial mail looks like what you might expect from a headhunter or a human resources (HR) recruitment specialist.
“I hope this note finds you well,” the email begins. “Your reputation as a visionary marketing leader has caught out attention, and I’d like to share an extraordinary opportunity with you at Netflix.”
Undoubtedly this email is crafted by AI and based on real-life examples. The role offered in the email as VP of Marketing would be a fitting role for the person that received this email, so it looks as if the scammers have done their research before reaching out.
Replying to the initial mail—which is not recommended, unless you like letting scammers know you exist and encouraging them to send you more phishes—got us one step closer to landing the exciting new job at Netflix.
We received an invitation to set up an interview with the ‘Netflix HR team’.
Following the link under “Schedule Interview” gets us a block by Malwarebytes web protection.
Again, not something we would want our readers to do but in the interest of learning more about the scam, we bypass that block and proceed to the website.
We find that there are 20 openings, all more or less in the same fields of social media and marketing.
The website itself is a mix of content copied from the actual Netflix site and of the phishing campaign.
Back to scheduling our interview. We’re given an option to choose our interview slot:
Regardless of which of the two buttons you use on the screen, you’ll be asked to sign in to your existing “Career Profile” or create a new one.
At this stage, all red flags should go up. It doesn’t matter if you choose “Continue with Facebook” or whether you enter your email and click “Continue with Email” the next screen will ask you to sign in to your Facebook account.
The only difference is that the second option fills out your email in the login screen.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense—Facebook is not known to keep track of your calendar. It does keep track of a lot of things, but your meeting schedule isn’t one of them. Besides, if you look at the address bar, you’ll see I’m still at the fake Netflix site.
However, it’s very normal practice to offer the option of logging in with Facebook on third party sites, so it would be understandable for the jobseeker to click that link.
When you enter the credentials and click on “Log In”, it will take a while and then you’ll be notified that “The password you’ve entered is incorrect. Please try again!”
This login page is also the part that makes this attack a very sophisticated one. The phishers use a websocket method that allows them to intercept submissions live as they are entered. This allows them to try the credentials and if your password works, they can log into your real Facebook account within seconds. They could potentially ask for multi-factor authentication (MFA) confirmation if that’s necessary, too.
Imagine that the phisher can instantly see the credentials you submitted, tests them at the real Facebook login page, and subsequently sends you the appropriate response. (In my case “wrong password” since I had no intention of feeding them valid credentials.)
You’d have no idea that they were accessing your Facebook account and they’d have bought some time to log you out, spam your friends, or whatever else they wanted to do with your account.
We often see phishing campaigns like these that are explicitly designed to steal the credentials of marketing managers, social media staff, and especially those who have access to company Facebook Pages or business accounts.
Compromising a business account can allow attackers to run malicious ads using the company’s payment methods, demand a ransom for return of control over the account, or use the company’s reputation to spread more scams.
What to do
If you suspect your credentials may have been compromised, immediately change your passwords, enable multi-factor authentication, and notify your IT/security team if you have one.
You can stay safe from these attacks by:
Be super cautious at engaging in job offers that you have not applied for.
Carefully check the URLs, both in the email and on the website, before you click them (did you notice the missing “i” in the domain name?)
Check if the address in the browser bar matches what you expect to see, along with the content of the website.
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